Last week's revelation that the UK government was planning sweeping extensions to RIPA (its snoop enablement legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) has provoked a furore and a mini-climb-down. Instead of attempting to give data seizure powers to every bureaucrat working for virtually every public body in the land today, the order will be put to parliament next Monday.

Sun Microsystems Inc will today announce that its "Cherrystone" UltraSparc-III workgroup servers, one of the few missing pieces in its Serengeti lineup of Sun Fire servers, are finally ready to go to market,
Timothy Prickett Morgan writes .
The Sun Fire V480 server was previously known internally as the 480R and is the …

On the eve of its launch of 3G services in the US, Sprint Corp has warned that its full-year customer growth figures in its mobile phone business could be 10% to 15% lower than its original estimate of 3 million.
The news, given in a financial update, led to its shares diving 29.5% to $10.58 last Friday, and puts the …

By its own admission, Toshiba Corp is today only a "blip on the radar" of PDA market leaders Hewlett-Packard Co and Palm Inc, but its latest range is intended to catapult it into contention by embracing growing corporate demand for wireless handheld devices.
The Tokyo, Japan-based company's latest e740 is among the first …

Fast Search & Transfer ASA has made a play for Google Inc's reputation as the web's largest search engine, in an effort to create a better brand to drive its enterprise business, Kevin Murphy writes. Fast said its consumer-facing site, AllTheWeb.com, now searches an index of 2,095,568,809 web pages, just over 20 million …

The UK government has run up the white flag over the proposed 'snooper's charter' extensions to RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act). Last week it intended to put these extensions before parliament today, yesterday it was going to do it next Monday, and today Home Secretary David Blunkett admits he goofed, and is at time of writing telling BBC news, "when you're in a hole stop digging."

Exclusive
You’d think Apple developers would have something better to do after a WWDC Beer Bash, than write to The Register. But instead of stumbling back to San Jose hotel rooms to be sick in a bucket, a number of you kind souls instead chose to tell us about "Jagwyre", the codename for the 10.2 release of Mac OS X. "Jagwyre" is definitely not a Harry Potter offshoot. It's Steve's private name for what Apple officially calls "Jaguar" but the stuffy and expensively-educated American trade press attending the keynote on Monday repeatedly sniggered at his pronunciation, which after deep consultation with you folks, we think is unforgivably bad manners.

Six economists who formerly worked for the US Department of Justice (which seems to wear them out pretty fast) have flung themselves under the wheels of Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly with the filing of a friends of court brief arguing for tough controls on Microsoft. According to a report in today's New York Times, the six ask that the court casts "a wide net, looking for rules or actions that will increase competition today by lowering entry barriers."

Server Briefing
Announced last autumn, Intel's Hyper-Threading technology has finally made it to market, courtesy of the latest Xeon processors. Hyper-Threading is a clever way of making a single chip operate like two separate devices without implementing two cores on one die. That, claims Intel, makes for higher performance without having to resort to significantly larger chips or even adding a second processor to the system.

After a short layoff, Microsoft is growing the polluted Java again. Boxed in by Sun's lawsuit the company decided not to ship its JVM (old, and pending resolution of the dispute, getting older) with Windows XP, but now it's going to ship it with XP SP1, which will be with us in a few months. It will also, bizarrely, be discontinuing downloads of the thing.

HP today announced that something called Walt Disney Feature Animation had fixed on HP Linux workstations and servers as components (we'll italicise the weasel words) in its next-generation digital animation production pipeline (oh screw, no we won't).